Le banni des îles

Carol Reed's "An Outcast Of The Islands" is generally conceded to be the finest film ever made of Joseph Conrad's tales. To be fair "Nostromo", "Under Western Eyes", and "Chance" never have been filmed. Hitchcock's "Sabotage" (based on "The Secret Agent") is a good Hitchcock film, but the story is modernized and changed. The later film version of the novel was politely received and then forgotten. "Victory" was made into a serviceable love and adventure story with Fredric March and Cedric Hardwicke, but the irony and allegory of the story was lost. "Lord Jim" was better recalled for the severe drubbing critics gave it - concluding with a Mad Magazine spoof called "Lord Jump". There is "Apocalypse Now" which is a fine attempt at "Heart of Darkness", but it changes the site of the story from the Belgium Congo of Leopold II to Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. "An Outcast" stuck to the basic story of Willems and his betrayal of Almayer and Captain Lingard for a beautiful native girl. Trevor Howard gave many memorable, delicate performances in his life (best, perhaps, for "Brief Encounter"), but this performance as a man who was poor enough material to begin with but goes to seed is possibly better. The supporting cast is great, with Robert Morley playing his most despicable character, and Ralph Richardson as the decent Lingard. George Coulouris is properly Machiavellian as the sly Babalatchi, and Wendy Hiller is tragic as that human dishrag Mrs. Almayer. The only problem a purist may have is that Willems is killed at the end of the novel accidentally (and quite memorably). Not so in the film. But his punishment of living as a monument to failure and hopelessness may be even more fitting - I leave to the reader/viewer.

This exciting film is well-worth watching. It is visually rich, and the acting is consistently surprising, even from such known quantities as George Coulouris and Wilfred Hyde-White. Trevor Howard shows great emotional flexibility, a quality we don't necessarily associate with him, and Robert Morley twinkles a good deal less than usual. Whether Sir Ralph Richardson looks good throwing a punch is something you'll have to decide for yourself.

However, the camera falls in love with picturesque young boys diving into water, which delays, over-ornaments and distracts from Conrad's austere story-telling.

More importantly, two of the female characters, Mrs. Almayer and Mrs. Willems, are turned from native women into transplanted Englishwomen, leaving Aissa the only native girl involved.

This has the effect of turning the movie into a tract on the horrors of miscegenation, when Conrad's novel is clearly focused on Peter Willems' double betrayal of Tom Lingard. Willems' taking up with a native woman is treated by the film as unique, instead of the usual thing in these climes. It is shown as embodying Willems' personal moral decline, which the book would regard as nonsense.

So if you can find the film, by all means watch it and enjoy its many virtues, but the movie has less to do with one of the great novels then it pretends to.

P.S. TCM now has this film in its library!

This movie got short shrift critically, because it followed Carol Reed's three greatest films, "Odd Man Out," "The Fallen Idol," and "The Third Man." It's been a while since I saw it, but if you get a chance and you're a fan of Reed's adventurous filmmaking, check it out. A riveting performance by Trevor Howard -- this, plus his performances in 3rd Man and Brief Encounter show an astonishing range. Robert Morley is wonderful as well.

My most memorable moments that still haunt me years after I saw the film: Morley "singing" a lullaby to his daughter ("Schlaf, kindchen, Schlaf") as Howard approaches in the night -- and said daughter calling "Pig!" after Howard's character later in the same scene. The bonfire, and Morley's torture. And Howard spotting Kerima standing in the water among the posts -- beautiful photography.

An unjustly forgotten film. May it play at a repertory theater near you.

Probably the most exotic film of the black & white phase of Carol Reed's career as a director, 'An Outcast of the Islands' marks his venture into Conrad's heart of darkness.

Although Ralph Richardson gets star billing as Captain Lingard the film plainly belongs to Trevor Howard in the title role as Peter Willems, succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh in the feral form of Kerima.

The British empire are represented by Robert Morley who brings weighty presence to the part of Almayer (with Wendy Hiller as his wife kitted out incongruously in a cute little bonnet and carrying a parasol); while further down the cast list comes the remarkable sight of George Coulouris in blackface and veteran silent director A. V. Bramble as Kerima's father, a blind village elder who when he throws a curse on Howard draws the response - displaying typical British sang froid - "Well, that's not very helpful!"

I remember making an occasion of my 50th "user comments" by electing to write about a film that I found rather special, Carol Reed's "The Third Man". I concluded those comments by saying that I would take the opportunity to write about Reed's one remaining great film, "Outcast of the Islands", as my hundredth contribution, so here goes. We had left school by the time "Outcast" appeared so opportunities for quizzes during breaks no longer existed. Instead a group of us would visit the cinema together once a week and when walking home would give each other a slot of about ten minutes in which to extemporise a criticism of what we had just seen. This would certainly have been our "Outcast" game as we devoured everything Reed gave us. He was in fact our God. Although much of his work now seems a little dated and I am not at all sure that "Odd Man Out" or "The Fallen Idol" are quite the masterworks that we thought they were at the time, critical acclaim seems undiminished for "The Third Man". This has never been quite the case with "Outcast" although it found a great devotee in Pauline Kael who described it as "a marvellous film". It is a work that grabs you from the very first shot of a seething mass of natives and even an elephant on a dockside in the Far East and sweeps you forward with its tremendous pace and the director's sheer love of bravura cinema. It doesn't quite conform to any of the conventional genres being hardly an adventure thriller, a romance or a tragedy and yet it has elements of all three. I suppose one would have to call it high melodrama, a film, epic in its detail and scope yet more concerned with integrating its vast gallery of images of local colour into its narrative than bursting into big set-pieces of action. Films about anti-heroes have never had great box office success, much less those where the anti-hero is weak through and through. Was it this that doomed Wyler's greatest film "Carrie" to near oblivion and was partly the reason for the neglect of "Outcast of the Islands"? And yet to ignore Trevor Howard's marvellous portrayal of Joseph Conrad's pathetically inadequate Willems would be to pass over one of British cinema's finest performances. And then there is that great actor Ralph Richardson as Captain Lingard whose Achilles heel is the misplaced trust he places in Willems. His portrayal has been seen as over the top by some but I would defend it to the hilt for its quality of Shakespearian declamation that is all part and parcel of Reed's directorial style. So often during his work of this period he shoots his scenes, particularly those between two characters, as if they are taking place on a huge theatrical stage. They shout at each other across large spaces, an effect that gives such scenes tremendous strength and resonance. The final sequence of "Outcast" between Howard and Richardson where they employ this device during the sudden outbreak of a tropical rainstorm is so powerful it has haunted me for years. It is possibly the single greatest scene in all Reed's work. Although he managed to retain his uniquely individual style of cinema throughout the subsequent "The Man Between" and the early part of "A Kid for Two Farthings", he was working with much less interesting scripts. That he ultimately lost even his stylistic fingerprints in later works such as "The Agony and the Ecstasy" and "The Running Man" is one of cinema's greatest tragedies.